New Books In Military History

The theme of exile in Irish writing often calls to mind Joyce or Beckett, but rarely does it conjure up other writers or literary networks, particularly those of the often-overlooked literary history of the nineteen thirties. Goldstone’s original new study, Irish Writers and the Thirties: Art, Exile and War (Routledge, 2020) takes up the theme of art and exile by focusing on four Irish writers—Leslie Daiken, Charles Donnelly, Ewart Milne and Michael Sayers—and brings to light important local and global aspects of the Popular Front cultural movement. Tracing literary networks from interwar London to the Spanish Civil War and the USSR Goldstone skillfully exposes the ways that these lives overlapped and entwined, revealing the relationships between these writers and George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Nancy Cunard, William Carlos Williams, and others, thus illuminating internationalist aspects of a Leftist cultural history. This book is commendable for its discussion of how Irish literary women on the le